Independent rural radio stations increasingly closing, which often weakens community identity and access to local news - Entrepreneur Generations

Co-owner and operator Mark Lucke at KHIL AM, which is in danger of closing after broadcasting in Willcox, AZ (pop. 3,500) for 60 years. Tanya Tucker used to listen to the station as a child. (Guardian photo by Cassidy Araiza)

More and more rural radio stations have been forced to close in recent years, which often weakens community connections.

"Small-town radio is fizzling nationwide, as stations struggle to attract advertisement dollars. And as station owners are forced to sell, media conglomerates snap up rural frequencies for rock-bottom prices, for the sole purpose of relocating them to urban areas," Debbie Weingarten reports for The Guardian. "In a more affluent market, they can be flipped for a higher price. With limited frequencies available, larger broadcasters purchase as many as possible – especially those higher on the dial – in a race not dissimilar to a real estate grab."

The trend toward consolidation kicked off after the 1996 Telecommunications Act allowed for such deregulation. Reed Hundt, then the Federal Communications Commission Chair, told Congress it would foster "innovation and competition in radio" and promote "diversity in programming and diversity in the viewpoints expressed on this powerful medium that so shapes our culture," Weingarten reports.

"And yet the act did not deliver on these ideals. Instead, for the first time, large media companies were allowed to buy up multiple stations without restriction. By 2002, the radio industry was essentially an oligopoly – just 10 parent companies controlled two-thirds of the listeners and revenue," Weingarten reports. Those companies buy up the best signals and get the best advertisers, leaving independent rural radio stations with "fewer listeners, fewer sponsors, and far less revenue to get by."

The owner consolidation has led to content consolidation: Today, it's common for one automated center to feed content to stations all over the country. The lack of local information and identity worries Dennis Deninger, a Syracuse University communications professor whose first media job was reading obituaries on air at a radio station in rural New York. "If local radio stations are getting their content fed in from some distant studio in another state, you have less information about your home," Deninger told Weingarten. "Having less information about where you live and the people you live with … I can’t think that’s a good thing."

from The Rural Blog http://bit.ly/2Iz54aK Independent rural radio stations increasingly closing, which often weakens community identity and access to local news - Entrepreneur Generations

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